(I'm from Italy originally).
My wife and I left a meeting in a business park in Phoenix and decided to walk the 5 mins to the local shopping mall, have a look around and then get a taxi back to the apartment in which we were staying (We'd taken a taxi to the meeting).
We were about 2 minutes into our walk when a car pulled up and it was one of the people from the meeting. People in the office had spotted us walking and assumed there was some kind of emergency or our car had broken down.
We had to be very politely insistent that we didn't need a lift to the mall and were perfectly fine.
At peak it’s 1/4 to 1/3rd the time.
Cars are slow around town.
If anything, I feel like traveling at rush hour is actually strictly better for me. Cars being slow doesn't slow me down, but with the average speed being so much lower during rush hour, it seems like it makes it so if a driver hits me, it would be at a lower speed.
Short errands are much nicer with a bike: less effort than walking, much faster than walking, no parking headache at destination, cool breeze in your hair, and free (no gas, insurance, parking, tickets…)
And to top it off, the dual flights and whale would need complex orchestration too!
We just call it Kubernetes…
I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry.
Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software.
The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.
When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.
How far we’ve fallen.
Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out.
Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way…
Qatar might even give you a plane!
Mass is a nonsense analogy that doesn't reveal anything useful.
Of course, the real cost-saving is in labour—web development presents a radically lower barrier to entry compared to even non-native, cross-platform UI/UX platforms such as Qt, or Flutter, or what-have-you, let alone simply managing multiple native applications.
So this is not a bill-of-materials kind of analogy, it's a statement about talent.
Web leaders have grown complacent; at times, it seems they don't take things seriously. I mean, just take a look at something like SvelteKit. I'm not a web developer, however I happen to like Svelte a lot, but also despise SvelteKit equally as much.
Every major release is like "fuck you."
Using Electron to package your application often saves time over writing a native app.
Giving a regular user a ready-to-use app saves them time, because they aren't googling "how to use terminal" for five minutes or trying to copy-paste the magic command out of their notepad app.
Under some circumstances; arguably, in only a handful of circumstances. The colloquial 10xer may as well as get the job done at a fraction of the labour cost associated with a 10-man senior (but really, comparatively junior) team, whereas the latter would spend months rewriting, refactoring, troubleshooting, triaging, bug-hunting, what-have-you...
Much can be said about inefficiencies of engineering teams.
That being said, the fact that quick maths can give you a 6 orders of magnitude difference between functional code and the package is probably reason for concern.
The business logic for humans is a single reproductive cell.
A single sperm weighs 2.3 x 10^-11 grams. If the average male weighs 75kg the. The bloat ratio for a human male is 3.2x10^15
Getting back to the app there is huge value in not needing to run the command yourself. Sure it’s wrapped in a UI that comes with “bloat” but honestly who cares. When was the last time someone needed to worry about hard drive space, when it comes to a 40mb file.
All of which sucks up your compute resources and battery. Repeat for every such little utility app you have on your Mac. Some may implement that random stuff inefficiently (eg very frequent telemetry), which sucks even more. Some of it may even be wrong, vibe coded, or copy pasted.
Personally, puts me off installing random utility apps, even if the single utility would be useful.
Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes
Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000
Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound.
Then the whole app would weigh: 1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds
What weighs ~2.35 million pounds?
TOTAL: ~2,304,000 lbsThe business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top.
Just to run 20 bytes of logic.